Movie Film Theatre Phantom of the Opera

Watched the last hour on HBO. It is just dreadful. Joel Schumacher is a self-indulgent show-off who doesn't trust his actors, the music , the material to tell the story. Through all that busy camera work, he whips every scene into a frenetic, incoherent, hyperbolic mess. As though Lloyd-Webber doesn't already do exactly the same thing with his lushed and larded music. He consistently undercuts physical beauty of Gerard Butler (Phantom) and Emily Rossum (Christine) forcing us to listen to the voices, which are, respectively, bad and thinly lovely. And is Minnie Driver meant to be comical or serious? She veers between both poles, crashing into both without much finesse. It is unwatchable. Compare Phantom with Alan Parker's version of Evita. Admittedly, Evita's book is more interesting than Phantom (I think), but the movie is crafted by someone who knows what to do with his material and his actors.